Travel Snack Week: Sweet Potato Chips with Honey Yogurt Dipping Sauce

Our fam­ily is def­i­nitely not travel ama­teurs. Scar­lett has been on a plane prac­ti­cally every few months since she was two months old. It's the real­ity when you don't live close to your family.

Ini­tially, my biggest prob­lem was her ears. How do you keep a baby from suf­fer­ing from ear pres­sure issues? Then it was sit­ting. What tod­dler wants to sit on a plane when there is a per­fectly empty aisle to race up and down? And finally there is take-off. The whole turn them around and face you thing is impos­si­ble when the kid wants to stick their fin­gers in the tiny TV that is actu­ally trans­mit­ting Tree­house to them. I'd for­got­ten what that was like. Then we headed South recently for our yearly trip to Florida. On the plane, in front of us, there was a woman trav­el­ing alone with her one and a half year old daugh­ter. As her luck would have it, she was seated in the mid­dle seat of a row in a packed plane. When it came time for take-off she hoisted her daugh­ter from the play area between her knees (only on a plane would you con­sider that an area to play in) into her lap and twirled her around to assume the posi­tion. As far as her daugh­ter was con­cerned, she was hav­ing none of it and instead spit into her mother's hair for the dura­tion of the plane's assent. The only thing that saved that poor mother was snack time. (Dear mother fly­ing to West Palm Beach, I so badly wanted to help you but I was wedged into my own mid­dle seat with the kid on one side mak­ing me play her badly designed ver­sion of Go Fish that had me fetch­ing cards from under neigh­bour­ing seats and the hus­band on the other side com­pletely engrossed in his movie. How con­ve­nient for him, you say? Why, yes, he watched an entire movie. In other words, my own travel hell.)

Pho­tos by Maya Visnyei

When you travel with kids, whether it's for an after­noon excur­sion or an extended vaca­tion, you have to arm your­self with snacks. Take the unknown mother shoved into a mid­dle seat, she trot­ted out an end­less sup­ply of lit­tle snacks for her daugh­ter, each likely designed to be a time-killing dis­trac­tion. Despite the fact that Scar­lett is now six, I still always have a few munchies on me as well as a can­teen for water. From now until for­ever, I'll likely always carry a muf­fin in my purse. It's a habit a mom can prob­a­bly never break (That and using your own spit to clean some­thing off their face.).

For our lat­est trip, I decided to add to my usual snack arse­nal of muffins and made some sweet potato chips. Scar­lett always wants chips from the mag­a­zine stand so I decided I'd bring along my own. If you pre­pare them the day before (Sorry, I just said that.…I know…you already have too much to do the day before you leave) and throw them in an air-tight con­tainer, you have an instant salt lovers snack. I didn't even worry that they don't resem­ble a waf­fle and fried chicken fla­vored Lays (I swear that's a real fla­vor). They could have been shaved bits of her school note­book and Scar­lett wouldn't have turned them down. She'll eat any­thing labeled a "chip." And I'm happy to have her eat them. Actu­ally, what she doesn't know, is I'd let her eat basi­cally any­thing in that ter­mi­nal as long as it guar­an­teed she wouldn't spit in my hair.

Bake in the oven for 50 min­utes, turn­ing once or twice, until edges are a dark golden brown and cen­ters are cooked through­out. Keep a watch­ful eye on the chips as they can burn quickly.

Mean­while, mix Greek yogurt and honey until blended.

Remove chips from oven and allow them to cool. They will crisp up even fur­ther as they cool. Serve with yogurt dip­ping sauce. You can also pack the chips in an air­tight con­tainer and eat on the go.

[…] Sweet Potato Chips — These healthy chips are deli­cious on their own so go ahead and leave out the yogurt dip­ping sauce. You know it's just going to end up spilling all over some binder any way. […]